To the editor:
I read with interest Jon Hochschartner’s Feb. 26 letter to the editor supporting the Animal Liberation Front. Drawing a limp parallel to the Abolitionist and Civil Rights movements, he attempts to cast this despicable, violent organization as champions of justice and right.
Without question, the ALF is a terrorist organization, and comparing its efforts to those of Malcolm X is both an assault on the intelligence of his readers and an insult to the Civil Rights movement.
He begins by painting a meandering portrait of militant abolitionist John Brown as a freedom fighter and heroic martyr. I suspect he is trying to take advantage of our sense of moral outrage over slavery in order to try to gain support for his personal convictions about animal use.
Conveniently for his argument, Hochschartner omits details of Brown’s actions leading to his execution, including the slaughter of five individuals in the 1856 Pottawatomie Massacre. Brown strove to strike terror in the hearts of pro-slavery individuals through wanton violence, and thus we call his means terrorism. We need not debate the rightness of his cause, but we should question whether any cause is sufficient to justify terrorism. Not to do so leads to a slippery slope of defining morally justifiable violence, murder and destruction.
His claim that the ALF has “never targeted a single person with violence” is patently false. The ALF and its affiliates, since their inception, utilized a campaign of fear and intimidation to achieve their ends. In March 2009, a car belonging to a University of California primate researcher was firebombed by a group affiliated with the ALF.
In other cases, firebombs have been left on doorsteps and in homes, and even the families and children of researchers have been threatened and intimidated in a coordinated effort to terrorize.
The letter is naive and disingenuous, and displays a dangerous tendency to treat incredibly complex ethical questions, vis-à-vis animal use in human society, as a dichotomy.
Does Mr. Hochschartner believe that animal research, one of the most regulated industries in existence today, and from which we have reaped enormous societal benefit, ought to end entirely?
The “Animal Rights” movement as represented by the ALF is a misinformed and misguided enterprise that seems unwilling to engage in constructive dialogue about rational ends, such as animal welfare, and prefers to perpetrate violence against property and people in pursuit of an imagined moral absolute.
Brian Curry
PSUC studen
4 comments
A close reading of what I actually wrote would reveal much that you have apparently missed. We need not debate the rightness of the cause because, I think, we can all agree that human rights (e.g., Abolition) is a just cause. It is more a question of tactics. I suppose you'd have to define "fight". I am familiar enough with your ramblings (esp. throughout the ScienceBlogs universe) to know that you would most likely argue that the cause of animal rights is sufficiently "righteous" to justify tactics that are, at best, ethically questionable. But again, as is the tendency of your ilk, you seem intent on distilling ethically complex issues to a laughable extent. I somehow doubt that you've entirely foregone advances made via animal research, yet you're perfectly willing to go on ad nauseam about its evils (most of which are practices abandoned since the AWA -- you'll find, should you wish to perform some intellectually honest research, that animal research has progressed significantly since then, and is indeed an industry that takes great pains to preserve animal welfare). Why you mention Iraq is beyond me.
North American Animal Liberation Press Office
www.animalliberationpressoffice.org